To deliver our message of the Journal’s commitment to the integrity and responsibilities of the press, we asked some of their most respected and popular reporters to share the most memorable stories of their often dangerous and always thorough reporting. We then scripted and recorded each story as a ninety second short, narrated by the reporters themselves. And lastly, to fully realize their hard work, we partnered with an artist, who is also a portraitist, to turn all the recordings into a series of engaging animated videos. We worked with him to develop a “one canvas” approach, which depicted the reporters’ narratives in sequential scenes panning from one to the next on one large conceptual canvas, with the ultimate final reveal being a mural portrait of each respective reporter built from the individual scenes and elements used to tell their stories.

We produced the series with a staggered production timeline that culminated in our first release in late February of 2017. Each video and portrait was created on a two-week long production cycle, with overlapping reviews and delivery dates to ensure timely releases on a weekly schedule. We offered an exclusive early preview for Journal members via a special digital newsletter before publishing the first completed mural portrait as a print piece featured in the weekend edition of the Journal that coincided with its public release on a microsite devoted to hosting the series. Every week, we released a new video in the series and promoted the campaign through the Journal’s owned social channels.

As an ongoing series, the videos have fostered a tremendous amount of support from both readers and journalists alike. The campaign’s principled stance against the failing trustworthiness of news media was a welcome message for those hoping to stay informed without fear of manipulation or lazy reporting. As an institution designed to provide transparency in the highest levels of business and politics, the Journal’s application of those same principles to their own work had reaffirmed for their millions of members the fact that the faith placed in their reporting was well-deserved, and squarely established their brand of unbiased journalism as the face of real news.